More than 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week. Federal stockpiles of medical supplies are running low as the death toll rises and global infections approach one million.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she was creating a bipartisan House select committee to oversee both the implementation of the $2 trillion economic stabilization package and the overall pandemic response.
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When the first cases of the coronavirus were reported in the United States just over a month ago, President Trump mostly dismissed the looming threat, Wall Street chugged ever upward and people set about their business with scant recognition of the calamity that lay ahead.
On Thursday, the stunning scope of the economic disaster became clearer as the Labor Department reported the loss of 10 million jobs in just two weeks. Wall Street has seemingly imploded and the global economy has shuddered as the fallout of the pandemic reaches into every country on earth.
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Hopes for a violent but brief downturn followed by a quick recovery have faded, and in their place are fears that the world may be on the cusp of an economic shock unseen since the Great Depression.
The speed and scale of the job losses is without precedent. Until last month, the worst week for unemployment filings was 695,000 in 1982.
The S&P 500 rose slightly after the U.S. government announced on Thursday morning that 6.6 million people had filed for unemployment benefits last week. A short while later, oil prices spiked, lifting shares of energy companies, after Mr. Trump said that he expected the leaders of Russia and Saudi Arabia to announce oil production cuts. Oil prices had been hammered as the pandemic all but eliminated travel and demand for energy, and a price war between Saudi and Russia had intensified the decline.
By shuttering businesses and forcing vast layoffs, the virus outbreak has in two weeks wiped out more jobs than the worst months of the 2008 financial crisis.
Washington continues to debate its next steps. Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California announced on Thursday that she was creating a bipartisan House select committee to oversee both the implementation of the $2 trillion economic stabilization package approved by Congress last week, and the overall pandemic response.
The impact has been global.
Almost one million Britons have applied for welfare payments in the space of two weeks. Austria has its highest unemployment rate since the end of World War II. Millions of French workers have applied for some form of subsidy even as the government embarks on an ambitious plan to keep businesses from going under.
The unemployment rate in Norway jumped to 10.4 percent from 2.3 percent at the beginning of March, and unemployment claims in Spain and Italy have mounted as the death tolls have increased.
More than 800,000 Spanish workers lost their jobs in March, the highest monthly drop in modern history.
Most nations in the European Union are deploying far-reaching government efforts to contain the fallout in the event that the epidemic takes months, rather than weeks, to contain.
While the $2 trillion rescue package signed by Mr. Trump will be sending extensive relief to American workers and businesses, deep economic pain was already being felt from coast to coast.
Economists have warned that when people have to make choices in spending limited money, like skipping restaurant outings to pay for groceries, the knock-on effects could turn an acute economic crisis into a long recession.
If laid-off workers can’t pay their bills, there could be a cascade of further layoffs and business failures. The greater the damage, the less chance of a quick economic rebound once the health crisis eases.